HE COULDN'T STAND THE MUTTON

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 729, 3 July 1953, Page 25

HE COULDN'T STAND THE MUTTON

()NE hundred years ago--on July 5, 1853-Cecil John Rhodes was born in an English country vicarage. His father was kindly and well-to-do. He had seven sons and he hoped that they would take Orders. His sons were no Churchmen; three went to the colonies and four joined the army. Cecil attended the local grammar school. At 16 he was found to be tubercular

(writes Denis Mitchell), and he was packed off to try his hand at cottonfarming in Natal, He gave it out that his real reason for leaving England was that he couldn’t stand the cold mutton. He was no family man, and he appears to have looked on his brothers with amused tolerance. Of Bernard he said: "He’s a charming fellow .. . rides, shoots and fishes . . . in fact, he’s a dam’ loafer." Cecil Rhodes decided to make .money. By 1882 he was worth £20,000 a year, and he had been elected to the Cape Parliament. By the time he was 37 he was a multi- millionaire and Prime Minister of the Cape, and his pioneers were making a road into a new country’ which was called Rhodesia. He died in 1902. Rhodes’s life work did not end with his death, for he left behind him a will in which he bequeathed the bulk of his vast wealth to found scholarships at Oxford University to be held by students from every im-

portant British colony and from | every State and Territory of the United States of America: . This «Sunday, July 5, at 10.45 a.m., listeners to 2XN Nelson will hear a talk by Brenda De Butts called- Empire Builder's Birthday. Our illustration is an etching by Miss De Butts, who lived for many years in Oxford, the "city of bells." It shows the Tom Tower and the entrance to Christchurch College, Oxford.